told her that he was shipping out again in a week, to go fly real fighters,
Hellcats, far away. He’d put in for the duty, wangled it, it’s what he’d
always wanted.
It didn’t seem to be a disaster, none of it; it was lifted up with
everything else that was being lifted up all around them, all around
the world, as by a tornado, lifted and swung around to mean some-
thing it hadn’t before. When they had been quiet a long time he lifted
his head suddenly and clipped his hands together and shook them, in
prayer or triumph, and she saw in the dimness the glow of his eyes
looking into hers.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 309
There was a lot to get straight between them, and it wasn’t easy; faced
with it she lost some of that lightness and carelessness she’d learned,
she faltered and felt her eyes fill and then her heart grow small and
cold. First she had to tell him she wasn’t nineteen, had lied about her
birthday, she had actually just turned eighteen, had been seventeen in
fact when they. And he told her he’d guessed she wasn’t as old as she
said, he didn’t know why he knew. She told him her real name too:
wrote it on a paper and gave it to him, solemnly, and waited for his
response.
“Geraldine,” he said, and shrugged, having no preference and
thinking it was funny she did. “Noo-nez? What kind of a name is
that?”
Another reason she’d withdrawn from the BBs when she and Danny
had got serious. They were always dropping hints about her when
Danny was in earshot, telling her she ought to get up and dance to
“South of the Border,” passing her the chili sauce, things like that,
though Danny had never picked up the hints.
“So it’s okay for you to marry a regular white person? It’s legal?”
“Yes it’s legal. Silly.”
“Hey, I don’t know. There’s laws in other states.”
She didn’t respond. He was studying her in a way that made her
shrink, or swell—somehow both at once. She was glad there had been
no Mexicans or anybody but palefaces where he’d come from—he said
it that way himself. Nothing for him to think about except a funny
name and some dumb songs. She told him her parents couldn’t know,
that if her brother knew he’d start trouble. She’d tell them after, when
they were happy and everything had to be the way it was, and they’d be
happy too.
He had nothing to tell her, was exactly what he seemed, all one
piece from front to back. She loved him, the one single thing he was,
and feared for him, and for herself; but she knew she could tell him she
was afraid, and it wouldn’t harm him or change him or pollute him.
The tornado was carrying her on upward away from the city and her
life and her family and all of it, shedding consequences, futureless,
awake.
310 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
They had only a week till he was gone. There was another flier in
his squad who was going to get married too, a fellow who had grown
up just outside the city and had a car still parked in his parents’ drive-
way. He was marrying his high school sweetheart, who was no older
than Diane and whose parents would never allow it, so they were
eloping, Danny said, as though the word itself were funny and sexy
and good. The four of them could get out of the state and across the
desert to where the wedding chapels were tying the knot for soldiers
and sailors by the dozen, they all four knew about them, there weren’t
the laws in that state there were here, you could get the license and get
married all in an afternoon. They could get back the next day.
They would leave early in the morning so they could get to the cha-
pels in time to choose one. They had to have the Wassermann test, but
the people at the chapel would do all the rest and by evening they could
have the ceremony, which only took a minute, like the sudden wed-
dings in old movies—Diane saw in her mind the comic judge or JP
with wide whiskers, his fat wife playing the harmonium, the couple (as
happy as any couple marrying anywhere) turning to each other in shy
delight and expectation. You may kiss the bride.
Danny’s friend picked them up before dawn downtown near the
park, Diane wrapped in Danny’s uniform blouse (she had started shiv-
ering violently in the chilly darkness). The friend was named Poindex-
ter, but Danny told her to call him Bill, and his girl was Sylvia, big and
blond and asleep beside Bill almost as soon as they started out. The car
was ten years old, smelly and noisy, with a spare tire tied on the side
that didn’t look any worse than the four poor things on the car (that’s
what Danny said, laughing, unalarmed). In the trunk were tossed a
dozen big bottles and a couple of empty jerry cans, which they’d fill
with water somewhere as they came down into the desert, as much for
the car to have as for themselves; and in there too was Sylvia’s patent
leather suitcase and now Diane’s round hatbox and case.
Morning city, pale and unpopulated, they were all quiet putt-put-
ting through the streets and out of the suburbs. At the edges of the
wide farmlands, the low buildings where the picker families lived. Men
and women and children, awake early, were climbing into the backs of
trucks. Sylvia said it was an awful life but those people were grateful
for the chance, they’d never had anything better. What Danny won-
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 311
dered was how they knew people would want that many artichokes:
he’d never eaten one in his life.
They rose up gradually into pine mountains littered with sinister
boulders as big as cottages, rose until they came to a place where a tower
of crossed timbers was built topped by a lookout shack high up, you
could climb up it if you wanted, but they had no time. From that last
height they could see far into the brown lands they had to cross, and
effortlessly the old car fell down over the folds of earth that turned at
length into wind-combed dunes, as though any minute they would reach
the sea. Bill and Danny joked about life in the service and told stories
full of acronyms and abbreviations that the girls couldn’t understand,
but they laughed too. When the road stretched and straightened there
was a big government sign warning travelers that the desert ahead was
dangerous, that they shouldn’t attempt it unprepared, that there would
be little in the way of help for them: and on top of the sign a big black
bird perched. “A vulture,” Sylvia said in horror, but it wasn’t really.
They stopped at a gas station building so low and flat it seemed to
have been stepped on by God. It had a big warning sign too about the
road ahead, handmade, with a skull and crossbones on it; the place
claimed it was the last stop for water and gas until the city on the other
side was reached. They filled the tank, and bought water.
“Gwaranteed alkali-free,” said the dried old hank of a man work-
ing the pump.
“Alkali will kill you,” said Bill.
Actually in a few miles there was another place that said it was
really the last, and had rattlesnakes and lizards in cages to look at; and
then another place farther on, the same. “The last last place’ll be just
when we get there,” said Bill.
As the day reached noon Sylvia dropped her joking about vultures
and mirages and Indians and who painted the Painted Desert; Bill
drove the straight road with one finger on the wheel. Diane curled her-
self against Danny in the back, feeling suspended, shaken by the car